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Topic: Cisco vs Avaya (Read 3374 times)

Good evening! I am a network infrastructure technician for the military, (the AFSC is cyber transport in case you were wondering) and have been assigned a task by my supervisor to find out the cost comparison of Avaya vs Cisco switches. We're about to conduct a huge transformation from Avaya switches to Cisco throughout our base, and because certain individuals are too lazy the job was assigned to me! Is there a website or a spreadsheet that has similar model cost comparison? After scouring for a good minute I was unable to find any concrete information. For instance, what would be the cost of cisco switches with the most similar capabilities to Avaya 4826, 4850, 5520, or 5632 model switches?

Going Cisco: Add 20% up-front costs for 2900 series, add 80% for 3850 series, not including uplink modules and other items/models that can push you to double the cost. Push for discounting from any VAR you work with, or use CDW's pricing as the starting point.

Technology:You will miss certain routing features going ERS series, and you will miss full Netflow capability vs the sampled IPFix of the ERS.

Unfortunately, the spreadsheet I created comparing a wide range of Cisco vs Extreme/Nortel/Avaya switches has proprietary data in it. It has 18 models of switches listed and the columns go out to AV on the spreadsheet covering the gambit of performance, port type/count, PPS rate limiting, DB ratings, redundancy capability, etc. You can get most of this data from the tech spec guides, but you should include details that are crucial to your operation in your column selection when building your spreadsheet.

Few months back I went through the similar exercise and compared Cisco Nexus, Extreme Networks, Aruba HPE, Juniper core and edge switches.You may be aware that Avaya networking is now part of Extreme Networks. I have spoken to senior technical people within Extreme network and was told, although ERS will continue but more development will be made in EXOS platform. They are moving toward Fabric based architecture (away from traditional L2 vlan based ip segment, ACL etc) https://www.extremenetworks.com/resources/solution-brief/extreme-fabric-connect/

Cisco is also pushing towards DNA their fabric based campus (including edge) which in based on traditional physical switches (Underlay network) and Overlay network (fabric). Cisco's Catalyst 3650, Catalyst 3850 , 2960x support fabric. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/index.html?dtid=osscdc000283#~solutionsSame is the case with Aruba HPE. All these vendors are selling traditional L2, L3 campus network devices as well as fabric based.You will see these vendors are in the top right quadrant for a reason.

Cisco is expensive than Extreme Network, which was expensive than HPE Aruba. But at the same time it depends on the amount of discount you get on the list price. They tend to vary their discount between 33%-66% with additional possible buy back discount.

I also heard Extreme is looking at shrinking the ERS platform - Except it is selling almost as fast as they can make them.Regarding Cisco's Campus Lan - It is an overlay, wholly dependent upon a Layer-3 protocol underneath, with all the associated foibles of BGP, OSPF, etc. If you want to stretch the fabric through your Data Center, you can only bridge the two fabrics via Nexus 7000 Chassis. Also, if you want to extend this to the edge, only the 3850's are capable of doing this.SPB-M, what Extreme bought with the Avaya purchase, doesn't have these limitations, at least so far through our implementation. While we could have implemented this on our ERS8800 platform, we made the move after the VSP 8200 platform was released.